Discovery shows how a terminal cancer patient will stay around for a while ... as a modern mummy

Just three months after cab driver Alan Billis was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, he was thumbing through a newspaper when an advertisment caught his eye.

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"He read those newspapers, front to back and back to front," his widow Jan Billis, 70, told the Daily News.

The ad was looking for someone suffering from a terminal illness who would be willing to donate their body to an ambitious experiment in the U.K.

It was from a group of scientists and a documentary TV crew who wanted to try to create a mummy using preservation techniques last practiced by the ancient Egyptions more than 3,000 years ago.

The strange tale of Billis' body unravels Sunday in "I Was Mummified" on the Discovery Channel.

"He came downstairs and said, 'I've just phoned someone about being mummified,' " Jan said calmly.

"And I thought, 'Oh, here he goes again.' That's just the sort of thing you would expect him to do."

For almost two years a camera crew spent time with the Ballis family. They filmed him at home, on vacation and playing with his six grandchildren.

"He didn't want his grandchildren to forget him and he thought that if he was a mummy, they wouldn't," Jan said. "That's why he did it. He didn't look upon it as something awful; in his mind he figured that 'at least I'll still be here for the children.' "

And he is — forever.

The mummified body of Alan Billis is on permanent display at Kings College musuem in London, comfortably resting among thousands of similar human oddities and specimans collected over the years.

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"We've been to see him a couple of times in the museum," said Jan. "The grandkids will tell anybody who comes along, that granddad's a mummy — in fact, the smallest ones love to talk about him quite openly. The other day I went into the bathroom and they'd wrapped Alphie (3 years old ) in towels and said, 'Look mum, granddad is on the floor in the bathroom.' "